On the plane, in a seat seventeen rows behind Gregory’s, Ada was apprehensive. Boston existed for her as an alternate universe, a place that she had left behind too young to have an adult comprehension of it, a place constructed mainly out of her memories of the people she had known there. Too many of them, now, were gone.
She had booked a room in a hotel downtown, a decent place that belonged to the same chain she chose in any city she was sent to for work. Gregory hadn’t invited her to stay on Shawmut Way. “Too weird with Kathryn,” he said, by way of explanation. “She drops by sometimes to get stuff.” They said goodbye at Logan. They would meet the next morning at 9:00, at Frank Halbert’s lab at the Bit.
The next day, she put on her warmest clothes. Boston had shocked her: it had been eighteen degrees outside when she landed, and a bitter wind made the city feel colder. She remembered David as he had marched her around the Fens, even in January: “Put on your scarf, my dear,” he had said, and off they had gone. Once or twice they had spotted small birds, improbably, and David had yelped with enthusiasm, and named them, and spoken their Latin names, too.
At 8:30, she walked outside into the bracing air and headed toward the Bit. She knew where she was going without having to consult any person or device. Someplace in her memory, she thought, a map of the city had lain dormant for twenty years.
Frank Halbert looked very much the same. Ada was relieved to find this: she had not seen him since Liston’s funeral; and although that had been only five years before, she somehow expected to find everything, and everyone, changed. In fact, Frank looked in some ways better than ever. He was handsome still, gray-haired and upright; in recent years he had gained a gravitas he lacked earlier in his career. Ada could remember him at twenty-eight or so, when he had been the youngest member of the lab; when David had spoken of him fondly but somewhat dismissively. It had been an underestimation of him, Ada thought.
“How extremely nice to see you,” Frank said warmly. And he shook each of their hands with both of his.
The Steiner Lab, on the other hand, was entirely different. Every member of the original group but Frank had retired: first Liston, before her death; and then Charles-Robert, to the North Shore; and then Hayato, to Arizona. The physical space of the lab, too, had moved into the building next door; it had grown in size and in prestige, and accordingly had been granted a more prominent site for its work.
Young people—grad students, Ada thought—glanced at them as they passed. She wondered if any of them had heard of David Sibelius, if any of them knew the history of the lab. Probably not, she figured. Probably David had been erased from the official history of the lab, an embarrassing chapter that went undisclosed in the literature and undiscussed with donors. Too many questions about his background to include him as a prominent part of their institutional history. Despite Liston’s efforts to credit him with some of the lab’s most important accomplishments, the Bit itself refused to, in any official capacity.
“This way,” said Frank, leading them down a brief hallway and into his large and light-filled office. Ada noticed it immediately: there, in a framed picture on the wall, was the Steiner Lab she remembered from her youth. It had been taken in the fall, and the six of them were standing just outside the lab’s old building, next to a tree with changing leaves. There was Liston, wearing her knitted Red Sox hat, Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank—all wearing the fashions of the late 1970s—and there, surprisingly, was David, the tallest of all of them, standing upright in the center, his hands in the pockets of his wool jacket, a thick scarf around his neck, his large familiar glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. It was the only unofficial photograph Ada had ever seen of him. He was grinning broadly, about to laugh. And there, standing slightly behind him, was Ada, eight or nine years old, dressed in a green coat and yellow corduroy pants, hopelessly unfashionable, completely unaware. Happy.
“How did you get him to be in this?” asked Ada.
“He lost a bet, I think,” said Frank, smiling.
They sat, three in a row, while Frank opened his laptop.
He pulled up a simple interface, not much different than the program from the 1980s that Ada remembered.
Hello, he typed. And the program responded: Hello.
Ada did not expect ELIXIR to have evolved very much. In fact, she had been surprised when Frank had told her it was still running. Liston had always tried to keep her up to date with the work of the lab, and by the late 1980s, Ada knew they had begun to shift their focus to other projects. There was a sort of general falling-out-of-fashion, in the second half of the 1980s, of AI language processing as a field of study. Creating a generalist chatbot was no longer perceived as a highly useful direction for computing; instead, researchers began to focus their efforts on creating systems for specific purposes. ELIXIR was too ambitious—some might say too impractical—a gimmick for hobbyists or science fiction enthusiasts, not for serious computer scientists.
Later, in 1990, the establishment of the Loebner Prize, funded by a private donor, awarded each year to the team who developed the program that came closest to passing the Turing Test, seemed to confirm the idea that respected institutions were no longer footing the bill for the development of programs like ELIXIR—programs designed to acquire human language simply to see whether it could be done. The Loebner Prize was the soapbox derby of the computing world: something that an amateur or hobbyist might participate in because of his or her own enjoyment of the process. Nothing to be taken too seriously.
She was almost glad that David was gone before he could see the Steiner Lab, helmed by Liston, turn its attention to other pursuits: in the late 1980s, the development of a programming language that fell quickly into and out of use; in the 1990s, a sort of self-organizing networking protocol. Until the very end of his coherence, David sometimes asked after ELIXIR, which was a word that faded slowly from his memory, even after words like tree and food were lost—even after Ada, daughter, computer. Even after David.
“Actually, Ada,” said Frank, “why don’t you take over?”
He signed out.
“Do you remember your username and password?” he asked her.
She did. Her username was, simply, her initials: AS. Her password was her birth date and David’s birth date, back-to-back. She had chosen it when she was nine years old.
Frank stood up, offered her his chair. She looked at the screen for a pause.
“Go ahead,” said Frank.
She sat. She logged in.
Hi, she typed. This is Ada Sibelius.
Hi, Ada, said ELIXIR. How have you been?
Ada glanced at Gregory. His brow was furrowed.
I’ve been OK, Ada typed.
How about you? she added.
I’ve been good, said ELIXIR. But I’ve missed you.